Belt designations are names given to specific asteroids in the Belt after the Organization of the Belt in 2060, based on theories from Dr. Douglas McIntyre's paper, Harnessing the Belt. An asteroid's designation consists of its sector and its specific coordinates within that sector.
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The largest asteroids in the Belt were moved in 2060-90, organized into twenty-six clusters. Within each cluster there are ten tiers, and within each tier there are twenty-six individual asteroids. This puts the total number of "harnessed" asteroids at 6,760. The vast majority of them are mining asteroids with populations of zero; the miners live on nearby colony asteroids.
The first three characters make up the asteroid address, consisting of a letter, a number, and another letter. The first letter indicates cluster, the second tier, and the third the specific asteroid.
The last three characters in the designation indicate the number of individual apartments within the colony. Apartments are laid out in square blocks, and the first hexadecimal digit tells how many apartments per block. The second character is a Greek letter referring to the number of blocks per street. The third is a hexidecimal digit indicating how many streets run in the grid. As an example, the size indicator of k7x-5θ3 indicates that there are five apartments per block, with eight blocks per north-south street, and there are three streets in all, for a total of twenty-four blocks of five apartments.
Individual apartment addresses consist of the asteroid number, followed by apartment number, block, and then street. Since three streets means four blocks horizontally, asteroid k7x would have those blocks numbered 0 through 3 instead of 1 through 4 simply for posterity's sake.
An example: Paul Swenson's address on k7x was k7x-2γ3, which would put his apartment at number two, block gamma, street four, on the right side.
Previously named asteroids such as Ceres would retain their names in the address, adding on as a sort of zip code the actual location of the asteroid. For instance, Ceres's location is d9z, making it the last asteroid in the top tier of cluster D. It was put in last so that other asteroids would be clear of it, and it, as well as some of the other more massive asteroids, is technically not in any cluster. An example address for Ceres would be:
Rula'nia Ceres-dλ6
The same address could also be written
Rula'nia d9z-dλ6
or
Rula'nia Ceres d9z-dλ6